The NRC was not the first (nor the last) time when citizens used the language of international human rights as a lens through which to parse the substance and content of freedom in Ghana. The first part of this chapter explores the way human rights was utilized by Ghana’s government, labor unions, journalists and others during the first ten years of national independence. Human rights was and still is a mutable language deployed for myriad ends by different communities within Ghana and beyond. Its power was and still is in the attempt to mobilize a supra-national moral standard to describe, challenge, and condemn political violence. “Rights talk” in Ghana’s early independence period was inherently politically fraught; it was an invitation to consider if, when and how state violence become untenable—and what to do about it. Accordingly, a human rights history of Ghana is not a narrative of moral absolutes and bright lines; we are not entering the “world of uncivilized deviants, baby seals, and knights errant” that David Kennedy criticizes as the consequence of the human rights worldview.8
The second part of this chapter uses the NRC’s reports of suffering as a guide and touchstone in a brief recounting of Ghana’s journey through the late twentieth century. Encountering Ghana’s past in this way, through claims of human rights abuse, is controversial. Are these stories proven to be true? Are there other truths that are missing from citizen testimony? Can policies justified in their time now be condemned as intolerable? What separates a human rights violation from other types of violence? A human rights history of Ghana evokes uncertainty and even dispute; it is an accounting that avoids the illusion of consensus and instead magnifies the way Ghanaian political history remains unsettled.
Rights Talk and Ghanaian History
Before the NRC, Ghanaians deployed the language and concepts of international human rights in national politics. As a normative part of global, national, and local politics—indeed, as a “world-wide secular religion”—international human rights is expansive and diverse, including law, rhetoric, policy, and practice.9 It has the capacity to “construct a wide array of different discourses.”10 This fecundity is evident in decolonizing Ghana, where human rights rhetoric was utilized by diverse communities, for multiple audiences, and to diverse ends. In the era of decolonization, various communities marshaled human rights as the ethical ballast of diverse political agendas. Politicians, newspapers, and public intellectuals marshaled “rights talk” to discuss the global implications of Ghanaian politics, while labor unions, social organizations, and activists employed rights rhetoric to address their national government and the wider world in the same breath.
Contemplating human rights in late-1950s and early-1960s Ghana departs from the scholarship that emphasizes the waning days of the Cold War as the moment when international human rights captured the global imagination.11 This study presents an earlier trajectory where human rights talk was part of mapping and pursuing freedom in Africa’s anticolonial and early independence era. Aligned with Bonny Ibhawoh’s exploration of the significance of human rights language in colonial and decolonizing Nigeria, this study traces how Africans in Gold Coast and then Ghana “appropriate[d] and deploy[ed] in diverse ways the same language of rights and liberty that was so central to the British imperial agenda.”12 Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian anticolonialist and nationbuilder, utilized the rhetoric of human rights as a pragmatic political language, alternately marshaled at opportune moments in the halls of the United Nations and then later discarded as an emblem of Western political hypocrisy. Although the historian Jan Eckel describes Nkrumah’s ambivalence as evidence that human rights was a “marginal” concept in decolonizing Africa, this study challenges the idea that human rights pragmatism signifies a limited engagement.13 Rights talk, whenever and wherever it has been deployed—in the post–World War I League of Nations, in Geneva in 2016, or in the colonial Gold Coast—can never be separated from its political utility. Fundamentalist notions of human rights as a language of true believers mask the ways rights talk is always and everywhere a political weapon.
Writing in Foreign Affairs as the prime minister of a newly independent country, Kwame Nkrumah explained to “American readers” that in Ghana, self-determination was an “inalienable right.” “We are more concerned with fundamental human rights than with any particular skin color,” he explained, attempting to both assuage US fears of Pan-Africanism as racial chauvinism and to criticize American Jim Crow.14 Nkrumah’s attempts to win global hearts and minds were troubled by rival Ghanaian politicians who used the language of global human rights as a weapon against him. Foremost among these was Kofi Abrefa Busia, an esteemed Ghanaian politician and social scientist who vocally criticized Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership in the global public square.
Less than six months before Ghana’s independence in 1957, Busia urged the British government to compel Nkrumah’s party to include the European Convention of Human Rights in the new Ghana Constitution.15 Binding the newly independent Ghana’s constitutional order to the European Convention, according to Busia, was a necessary “safeguard.” He continued along these lines even after independence. In London in 1961, Busia criticized Europeans for failing to speak out against Nkrumah’s government in Ghana. “Is the cause of democracy served,” he admonished, “by accepting different standards of tolerance, or freedom, or veracity, or human rights?”16 Three years later, in another speech, this time to the Ghanaian Students Association, Busia again railed against Nkrumah’s leadership, specifically focusing on the cause of political prisoners and using the language of human rights. “We’ve got so used to it we don’t even stop to ask what it means to be inside a prison in detention,”
